Richard Eyre Quotes

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Richard Eyre

Profession : Director

Birth : March 28, 1943

Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.

Richard Eyre

What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.

Richard Eyre

All good actors are very bright. You can't be stupid and a good actor. You may be inarticulate, you may not be highly educated, but all good actors are quick-witted, some of them dazzlingly so. All you do is guide them.

Richard Eyre

Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it's curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that.

Richard Eyre

I'm never comfortable at theatre opening nights. If it's my own production I'm too wound up to be able to enjoy the performance and too wary to enjoy the event as a social occasion.

Richard Eyre

I resent all organised religions.

Richard Eyre

Don't ever be afraid to ask any question.

Richard Eyre

I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it.

Richard Eyre

There is in our society a gulf opening up, a kind of cultural apartheid, between those who are brought up to feel our national culture is theirs, to take ownership of it, and enjoy the privileges of that, and those who are completely disfranchised, those - for example - who will never be taken to the theatre to see Shakespeare.

Richard Eyre

There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.

Richard Eyre

I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.

Richard Eyre

I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.

Richard Eyre

Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.

Richard Eyre

I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the world a better place than when you came into it.

Richard Eyre

'Mary Poppins,' the movie, was an object of mockery if you were a student in the '60s, something to be laughed at.

Richard Eyre

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

Richard Eyre

I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.

Richard Eyre

The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.

Richard Eyre